“If the North is not utterly craven—”
“It’s the most atrocious thing they’ve dared yet!”
“Beecher’s bibles are the thing to answer it with!”
“The sooner the better!”
“If there’s any manhood at all in the North!”
After a little they grew calmer and went into the office, where Hardaker related the details of the event which was about to set both sections of the country in an uproar. Presently Rhoda asked what news he had had from his sister Julia, lately married—Rhoda had been her bridesmaid—and gone with her husband to Kansas. North and South were in the midst of their bitter struggle for the embryonic state, and from each settlers were pouring into it, there to translate their convictions into guerrilla warfare, while their friends at home waited fearfully each day as news came of battle, murder, the burning of houses, the sacking of towns.
“We’ve heard nothing worse, so far, than you’ve seen in the papers already. But it won’t be long. They’re cooking up some dastardly outrage and any day we may hear that Lawrence has been burned and all the people killed. Mother never opens the ‘Tribune’ herself now. She waits for me to look in it first and then tell her what the Kansas letters say.”
Hardaker was asked to stay to dinner, and Rhoda went to tell her mother of the guest. Then the two men drew their chairs close together and spoke in low tones.
“I saw Conners this morning,” said Horace, “and he told me that they’re watching his place so close now that it isn’t safe to have them come there any more. And he’s made up his mind to go out to Kansas anyway, and expects to leave in a month or two. So we’ve got to have a new station.”
“Yes,” mused Dr. Ware, “there must be some place not too far from the river where they can hide as soon as possible after they cross. I wonder if I could manage it here. If I could, this would be just the place. The house sets up so high that they could steer their course for it from the other side, and, once across, they could easily make their way up here after dark.”